Jamestown dig uncovers early farming clues

Archaeologist: 'They weren't stupid or lazy about the importance of planting corn'

August 19, 2013|By Mark St. John Erickson, merickson@dailypress.com | 757-247-4783

JAMES CITY — – Nearly 150 years after influential New England historian Henry Adams began questioning the accounts of Capt. John Smith and the work habits of the original Jamestown colonists, archaeologists probing outside the pioneering English fort have discovered new evidence suggesting they were neither lying nor lazy.

Preserved some 30 inches below the surface of the town's ancient graveyard, line after line of dark stains have emerged from the soil, providing the first physical evidence that the oft-maligned settlers invested substantial time and energy in trying to help feed themselves through farming.

Only a portion of what was once a 1607 corn field has been unearthed since the investigation began early this summer. But that find measures nearly half-an-acre in size all told and has exposed continuous sections of rows as much as 50 feet long.

"Historians have been asking for years whether Smith and the other colonists were really planting corn or just saying they were. And except for the historic records they left, we didn't really know," Historic Jamestowne archaeologist David Givens says.

"But every time we put a trowel into the ground we're finding that the archaeological record confirms what Smith and the other colonists said. They weren't stupid or lazy about the importance of planting corn. They were following their orders to plant exactly. And they were adapting their farming methods to the conditions in the New World right off the bat."

Described explicitly in the "Instructions" given to the colonists by the London investors of the Virginia Company, the cultivation of corn ranked alongside the construction of a fort and an expedition of discovery as one of the settlement's most important objectives during its founding phase in 1607.

Smith describes the colonists' attempts to fulfill that part of the directive numerous times in his accounts.

"Our next course was to turne husbandsmen, to fell Trees and set Corne," he reported in a narrative published in 1608.

"Fiftie of our men we imployed in this service."

Still, not until more than five years after the Jamestown Rediscovery project began in 1994 did archaeologists unearth proof of these early labors.

But no one recognized its significance at the time.

"We were digging outside the other end of the fort in 2000 when we found what appeared to be these huge plow scars," Givens says.

"They had no context. So we didn't know what they were. But when we saw them again this year we knew they were planting furrows. And when we discovered they had been cut by the 1608 palisade, we knew were looking at something from 1607."

Over the course of the summer, the archaeologists have unearthed row after row in which the colonists appeared to be using hoes — just like the Native Americans — to break the soil, pile it up into furrows and plant their corn.

Some of the exposed sections measure as much as 50 feet long. But project director William M. Kelso believes they extend much farther under the ground.

"Most people have believed that the colonists either didn't plant or wouldn't plant because they were too lazy," he said. "But when you find this much evidence, it proves that they did."

Forensic evidence gleaned from the settlers' bones provides further proof of their labors.

Though the earliest colonists could not sustain themselves by their own efforts alone — and suffered horribly when their food ran out during the Starving Time of 1609-10 — many of them put so much time in their fields that telltale signs of their toil can still be seen more than 400 years later.

Symptoms of herniated disks and vertebral stress were common in the remains studied by the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History for its exhibit "Written in Bone," which focused on early settlers in the Chesapeake Bay region.

"Lower back strain was constant in hoeing soil to make hills for planting corn and tobacco, or weeding between the hills until the corn or tobacco grew tall enough to shade out weeds," the investigators concluded.

"This isn't the way they would have planted if they'd been back in England using draft animals. But they had no draft animals here," Givens says, describing the way the colonists adapted and blended Native American planting traditions with their own.

"So this was the beginning of English agriculture in the New World, and it remained that way for centuries. They took a hoe and dug a ditch."

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Want to go?

James Fort archaeological site

Where: Historic Jamestowne, located on Jamestown Island at the west end of the Colonial Parkway